The trials of Margaret Clitherow : persecution, martyrdom and the politics of sanctity in Elizabethan England

Peter Lake presents a series of (mutually constitutive) moves and counter moves, in the course of which the regime's claims to represent a form of public political virtue, to speak for the commonweal and true religion, elicited from certain Catholic critics a simply inverted rhetoric of private political vice, persecution, and tyranny. The show more resulting exchanges are read riot only as a species of 'political thought', but as a way of thinking about politics as process and of distinguishing between 'politics' and 'religion'. They are also analysed as modes of political communication and pitch-making-involving print, circulating manuscripts, performance, and rumour-and thus as constitutive of an emergent mode of 'public politics' and perhaps of a 'post reformation public sphere'. While the focus is primarily English, the origins and imbrication of these texts within, and their direct address to, wider European events and audiences is always present The aim is thus to contribute simultaneously to the political, cultural, intellectual, and religious histories of the period. show less